The spoken core of British English: a diachronic analysis based on the BNC

This research takes as its starting point a frequency analysis of the demographicspoken
subcorpus of the British National Corpus in order to focus on two aspects
of the evolution of spoken core vocabulary in British English. The first is the impact
on the core of contact with other languages and, the second, the role of lexical
innovation and/or replacement in the history of this core. Our analysis, which, to
a certain extent, follows up on that carried out in Fuster (2007) questions the
hypothesis that the spoken core is immune to foreign influence or that it is highly
resistant to change.